Title: A Thousand Splendid Suns Year of publication: 2007 Author: Khaled Hosseini Author Bio:
-Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965. His father was a diplomat for the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother taught Farsi and History at high school in Kabul. In 1976, the Afghan Foreign Ministry relocated the Hosseini family to Paris, France. Eager to return to Kabul in 1980, Afghanistan had already witnessed a bloody communist coup and the invasion of the Soviet army. The Hosseinis were granted political asylum in the United States. In September of 1980, Hosseini's family moved to San Jose, California. Hosseini graduated from high school in 1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University where he earned a bachelor's degree in Biology in 1988. The following year, he entered the University of California-San Diego's School of Medicine, where he earned a Medical Degree in 1993. He completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Hosseini was a practicing internist between 1996 and 2004. While in medical practice, Hosseini began writing his first novel, The Kite Runner, in March of 2001. In 2003, The Kite Runner, was published and has become an international bestseller, published in 70 countries. In 2006 he was named a goodwill envoy to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns was published in May of 2007. Currently, A Thousand Splendid Suns is published in 60 countries. Khaled has been working to provide humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan through The Khaled Hosseini Foundation. The concept for The Khaled Hosseini Foundation was inspired by a trip to Afghanistan Khaled made in 2007 with the UNHCR. He currently lives in northern California. Setting and time period:
-The story takes place in Herat, Afghanistan, and Gul Daman, a small village outside of Herat, and then Kabul, the capital city from 1958 to the present day. There is also some time in Murree, Pakistan. Genre of Novel( Historial Fiction, Bildungsroman, etc):
-Historical Fiction. Theme statements (and "central questions"): - The themes present throughout the novel would be: man’s inhumanity to man, systematic victimization of women by patriarchal institutions, spousal abuse, resistance to victimization, power of education, education for women, and corrupting influence of absolute power. Primary characters (name/ relationships/ job/ key traits):
Mariam:She is the main character of the story. She was born illegitimately to a wealthy man of Herat and one of his housekeepers. She tries to force her father to acknowledge her as his daughter, but it leads to the heartache of her mother’s suicide and her own arranged marriage to Rasheed. She lives with him many years as an abused wife until Laila becomes his second wife. They establish a fast friendship and Mariam eventually kills Rasheed as he is choking Laila to death. She is executed by the Taliban for her crime.
Laila:She is a beautiful young girl with golden hair who is raised by a modern set of parents to be an educated woman in an Islamic world. Because her parents are killed by a Mujahideen rocket, and she is six weeks pregnant to Tariq whom she believes is dead, she married Rasheed. Like Mariam, she becomes part of a home where she is abused and where she carries on a lie that her daughter is Rasheed’s. Eventually, after Tariq surfaces and Rasheed finds out that she allowed him in their home, she is nearly choked to death by her husband. Only Mariam’s intervention saves her life. She is then forced to leave Afghanistan with her children in order to protect her son and daughter. Mariam accepts her fate and is left behind.
Tariq: He is the neighbor boy that Laila has always loved. He lost his leg when he stepped on a land mine quite early in his life, but is one of the toughest kids in his neighborhood. He always protected her from anyone who bullies her. He leaves Afghanistan with his parents when it becomes impossible to stay in a crumbling society. He promise to find Laila when he can. He ends up in a refugee camp where his father dies. He is determined to get his mother out of the camp and accepts a job delivering a leather coat to another city. Unfortunately, the coat is lined with hashish and he is caught by Pakistani police. He is sentenced to seven years in prison, which is really a generous sentence for the times and then is released. His mother has died in the interim and so he heads home to Kabul. There he finds Laila, and with his presence, sets up the death of Rasheed. He later escapes from Kabul with Laila and returns to Murree, Pakistan, to wed her and come to know his real daughter, Aziza. In the end, he agrees to go back to Kabul when the Taliban is driven out to help rebuild the city they love.
Rasheed : He is villain of the story, a cruel, abusive man who was dead drunk when his only son fell into a lake and drowned. He had already lost his wife in childbirth and has become more than bitter. He is almost psychotic. He beats and verbally abuses both his wives whom he married to create a son to replace the one he lost. Later, his abusive behavior leads to his murder, when one wife kills him to save the other.
Jalil Khan:He is Mariam’s father who made the mistake of an affair with one his housecleaners to produce her. He is a loving father who visits her once a week at the hut in the village of Gul Daman where he has sent her and her mother to live. She is really an object of shame for him, but his love for her will not allow him to completely dismiss her. However, when she forces him to recognize her, he marries her off to Rasheed, a decision he comes later to regret very much. He comes to see her in Kabul to tell her that he is dying, but she refuses to see him. So, within days of his death, he leaves her oval box filled with a videotape, a letter of apology, and a huge amount of money from what he had left in material possessions. He sends it to Mullah Faizullah for safekeeping, just in case Mariam returns to find her father. However, he dies without ever hearing the knock at the door that would be Mariam.
Secondary characters (brief identifications):
Nana: She is Mariam’s mother who spends her last years becoming more and more bitter over the life she has been forced to lead with her harami daughter. She is the object of scorn, not very physically attractive, and not as kind to her daughter as she could be. Ironically, it is her daughter’s desire to live with her father that drives Nana into the ultimate despair and leads her to suicide.
Aziza: She is the daughter of Laila and Tariq, but Laila passes her off as Rasheed’s son because she is an unwed pregnant woman in a Muslim country. She grows up abused by Rasheed as well who hates her, even when he thinks she’s his child, because she is a girl. Later, Rasheed orders that she be sent to an orphanage when they have little food and not enough for everyone. There is is secretly educated by the orphanage director and thrives in the learning environment. She is reluctant to return to Kabul after her mother and father take her to Murree. However, when she is reassured that Tariq will never leave her, she willingly goes along to a new life.
Zalmai: He is the son of Rasheed and Laila and looks and acts like his father, even though he is just a small child. Whenever he is with his mother, he is a well-behaved and polite child. But when he is with Rasheed, he is demanding and spoiled. When his father dies, he is confused about where the man has gone, but Laila reassures him that Rasheed is just on a trip and will be home soon. When she and her children leave Kabul with Tariq, he at first refuses to recognize Tariq as a member of their family, but eventually the memory of his father, Rasheed, disappears as the man has himself, and Zalmai accepts Tariq as his father.
Mammy and Babi: They are Laila’s parents. Mammy is the victim of deep despair and ultimately severe depression when Babi allows their two sons to go off to fight the Soviets. They are eventually killed in that war and it nearly kills her. She is just recovering from that despair, brought back to life by the arrival of the Mujahideen, and willing to leave Kabul when these soldiers she loved turn on each other, when their house is hit by a rocket and she dies. Babi was once a high school teacher, but was fired when the Soviets arrived. He taught Laila about the importance of being educated and believing that women would be the salvation of Afghanistan. He dies in the same rocket explosion as Laila’s mother.
Mullah Faizullah: He is the tutor Mariam knew and loved. He came to the kolba to teach her the Koranic verses and prayers, but comes to admire her and believe she is a wonderful little girl who should be acknowledged by her father. He is devastated when her father marries her to Rasheed, but willingly saves the box that Jalil Khan leaves behind to save for the daughter he allowed to get away. He dies with the wish that his son guard the box for Mariam who will never see it.
Abdul Sharif : He is a doorman at the Intercontinental hotel in Kabul who is paid by Rasheed to pretend he had been in the hospital room where Tariq was brought and died. His story to Laila is filled with tenderness, sorrow, and supposedly Tariq’s last words. However, even though Laila readily believes it, it is all a lie, and only when Mariam recognizes him when she goes to the hotel to call her father, does Laila learn that this is how Rasheed tricked her into marrying him.
Notable structural, literary and stylistic techniques:
-There are several other literary devices that pop up at various times in the story. One of the most prevalent ones is foreshadowing which frequently presents clues of something that will happen later in the novel. Some examples of foreshadowing include:
Chapter 1.) When Jalil would leave, Nana would tell Mariam that he told rich lies - a rich man telling rich lies. She told Mariam that he had never taken her to see the tree and that he had betrayed them both by casting them out. This foreshadows how Jalil will one day refuse her entrance to his house and then marry her off to Rasheed............
Chapter 18.) On a blistering hot day, Mariam puts on her burqa and she and Rasheed take a bus to the Intercontinental Hotel. Rasheed speaks to the doorman while Mariam stands to the side and watches. She thinks there is something vaguely familiar about the doorman. This foreshadows the fact that the doorman had told Laila his name was Abdul Sharif and he had witnessed Tariq’s death.
Symbols: -Chapter1.) Nana tells Mariam that to Jalil and his wives, she was a mugwort or a weed that is ripped out and tossed aside. However, unlike a weed, she had to be replanted and given food and water on account of Mariam. -Chapter20.) Mariam is never very far away. She is mostly in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with a bursting radiance of a thousand suns. In this way, Mariam and Kabul have the same power for the people who love them. Tone:At times, the tone is tragic, filled with despair, and very sad. At other times, it is uplifting and hopeful. And towards the end, it is a triumphant. Major conflicts (in abstract terms, with resolutions): A major conflict in the novel is the discrimination of women. Every group that rules Afghanistan allows men to have complete power over their wives and then, the Taliban makes it law. Beatings, murder, loss of control of their children, and humiliation are only a few of the discriminatory practices among some Muslim countries. They continue even today. Mariam and Laila were only two women in the story who were abused and mistreated by their husbands. It is only their sense of loyalty to their children that often gives them the strength to persevere. Finally, after the Taliban get forced out of Afghanistan, women’s rights start to take effect. Key scenes (turning points, resolutions, climaxes--inc. page #'s): -The climax of the novel is when Mariam murders Rasheed. After that, the lives of the two women take very different paths. Mariam is arrested for murdering Rasheed and is executed in the stadium in front of thousands of people. Laila escapes Kabul and goes to Pakistan with Tariq and her children. She eventually returns, first stopping in Herat to see the place where Mariam grew up, and then returning to Kabul to create a better home and a new school for her children and the children of orphanage. Key quotations (annotate: identify speaker, situation, and relevance--inc. page #'s):
“She (Mariam) was being sent away because she was the walking, breathing embodiment of their shame.” (Pg. 48)
“Where I come from, a woman’s face is her husband’s business only.” (Pg. 70)
“But after four years of marriage, Mariam saw clearly how much a woman could tolerate when she was afraid.” (Pg. 98)
“People…shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn’t fair.” (Pg. 119)
“But Laila knew that her future was no match for her brothers’ past.” (Pg. 142)
“What a man does in his home is his business.” (Pg. 266)
“God made us differently, you women and us men. Our brains are different. You are not able to think like we can.” (Pg. 365)
“Kabul is waiting. Needing. This journey home is the right thing to do.” (Pg. 392)
“…Mariam is in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.” (Pg. 414) Your reactions/ reader responses (note personal reactions to any of the above categories, or any other element of the reading experience):
- I really enjoyed this book; it is definitely my favorite one I’ve read all year. I liked how it held my interest without something major happening every couple of pages.I also pleased by how Hosseini focused on the everyday life of his characters, it made it seem like this story actually happened. Notable literary devices present in work and how they contribute to meaning:
- See “Notable structural, literary and stylistic techniques”.
Year of publication: 2007
Author: Khaled Hosseini
Author Bio:
-Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965. His father was a diplomat for the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother taught Farsi and History at high school in Kabul. In 1976, the Afghan Foreign Ministry relocated the Hosseini family to Paris, France. Eager to return to Kabul in 1980, Afghanistan had already witnessed a bloody communist coup and the invasion of the Soviet army. The Hosseinis were granted political asylum in the United States. In September of 1980, Hosseini's family moved to San Jose, California. Hosseini graduated from high school in 1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University where he earned a bachelor's degree in Biology in 1988. The following year, he entered the University of California-San Diego's School of Medicine, where he earned a Medical Degree in 1993. He completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Hosseini was a practicing internist between 1996 and 2004. While in medical practice, Hosseini began writing his first novel, The Kite Runner, in March of 2001. In 2003, The Kite Runner, was published and has become an international bestseller, published in 70 countries. In 2006 he was named a goodwill envoy to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns was published in May of 2007. Currently, A Thousand Splendid Suns is published in 60 countries. Khaled has been working to provide humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan through The Khaled Hosseini Foundation. The concept for The Khaled Hosseini Foundation was inspired by a trip to Afghanistan Khaled made in 2007 with the UNHCR. He currently lives in northern California.
Setting and time period:
- The story takes place in Herat, Afghanistan, and Gul Daman, a small village outside of Herat, and then Kabul, the capital city from 1958 to the present day. There is also some time in Murree, Pakistan. Genre of Novel( Historial Fiction, Bildungsroman, etc):
-Historical Fiction.Theme statements (and "central questions"):
- The themes present throughout the novel would be: man’s inhumanity to man, systematic victimization of women by patriarchal institutions, spousal abuse, resistance to victimization, power of education, education for women, and corrupting influence of absolute power.
Primary characters (name/ relationships/ job/ key traits):
- Mariam: She is the main character of the story. She was born illegitimately to a wealthy man of Herat and one of his housekeepers. She tries to force her father to acknowledge her as his daughter, but it leads to the heartache of her mother’s suicide and her own arranged marriage to Rasheed. She lives with him many years as an abused wife until Laila becomes his second wife. They establish a fast friendship and Mariam eventually kills Rasheed as he is choking Laila to death. She is executed by the Taliban for her crime.
- Laila: She is a beautiful young girl with golden hair who is raised by a modern set of parents to be an educated woman in an Islamic world. Because her parents are killed by a Mujahideen rocket, and she is six weeks pregnant to Tariq whom she believes is dead, she married Rasheed. Like Mariam, she becomes part of a home where she is abused and where she carries on a lie that her daughter is Rasheed’s. Eventually, after Tariq surfaces and Rasheed finds out that she allowed him in their home, she is nearly choked to death by her husband. Only Mariam’s intervention saves her life. She is then forced to leave Afghanistan with her children in order to protect her son and daughter. Mariam accepts her fate and is left behind.
- Tariq: He is the neighbor boy that Laila has always loved. He lost his leg when he stepped on a land mine quite early in his life, but is one of the toughest kids in his neighborhood. He always protected her from anyone who bullies her. He leaves Afghanistan with his parents when it becomes impossible to stay in a crumbling society. He promise to find Laila when he can. He ends up in a refugee camp where his father dies. He is determined to get his mother out of the camp and accepts a job delivering a leather coat to another city. Unfortunately, the coat is lined with hashish and he is caught by Pakistani police. He is sentenced to seven years in prison, which is really a generous sentence for the times and then is released. His mother has died in the interim and so he heads home to Kabul. There he finds Laila, and with his presence, sets up the death of Rasheed. He later escapes from Kabul with Laila and returns to Murree, Pakistan, to wed her and come to know his real daughter, Aziza. In the end, he agrees to go back to Kabul when the Taliban is driven out to help rebuild the city they love.
- Rasheed : He is villain of the story, a cruel, abusive man who was dead drunk when his only son fell into a lake and drowned. He had already lost his wife in childbirth and has become more than bitter. He is almost psychotic. He beats and verbally abuses both his wives whom he married to create a son to replace the one he lost. Later, his abusive behavior leads to his murder, when one wife kills him to save the other.
- Jalil Khan: He is Mariam’s father who made the mistake of an affair with one his housecleaners to produce her. He is a loving father who visits her once a week at the hut in the village of Gul Daman where he has sent her and her mother to live. She is really an object of shame for him, but his love for her will not allow him to completely dismiss her. However, when she forces him to recognize her, he marries her off to Rasheed, a decision he comes later to regret very much. He comes to see her in Kabul to tell her that he is dying, but she refuses to see him. So, within days of his death, he leaves her oval box filled with a videotape, a letter of apology, and a huge amount of money from what he had left in material possessions. He sends it to Mullah Faizullah for safekeeping, just in case Mariam returns to find her father. However, he dies without ever hearing the knock at the door that would be Mariam.
Secondary characters (brief identifications):- Nana: She is Mariam’s mother who spends her last years becoming more and more bitter over the life she has been forced to lead with her harami daughter. She is the object of scorn, not very physically attractive, and not as kind to her daughter as she could be. Ironically, it is her daughter’s desire to live with her father that drives Nana into the ultimate despair and leads her to suicide.
- Aziza: She is the daughter of Laila and Tariq, but Laila passes her off as Rasheed’s son because she is an unwed pregnant woman in a Muslim country. She grows up abused by Rasheed as well who hates her, even when he thinks she’s his child, because she is a girl. Later, Rasheed orders that she be sent to an orphanage when they have little food and not enough for everyone. There is is secretly educated by the orphanage director and thrives in the learning environment. She is reluctant to return to Kabul after her mother and father take her to Murree. However, when she is reassured that Tariq will never leave her, she willingly goes along to a new life.
- Zalmai: He is the son of Rasheed and Laila and looks and acts like his father, even though he is just a small child. Whenever he is with his mother, he is a well-behaved and polite child. But when he is with Rasheed, he is demanding and spoiled. When his father dies, he is confused about where the man has gone, but Laila reassures him that Rasheed is just on a trip and will be home soon. When she and her children leave Kabul with Tariq, he at first refuses to recognize Tariq as a member of their family, but eventually the memory of his father, Rasheed, disappears as the man has himself, and Zalmai accepts Tariq as his father.
- Mammy and Babi: They are Laila’s parents. Mammy is the victim of deep despair and ultimately severe depression when Babi allows their two sons to go off to fight the Soviets. They are eventually killed in that war and it nearly kills her. She is just recovering from that despair, brought back to life by the arrival of the Mujahideen, and willing to leave Kabul when these soldiers she loved turn on each other, when their house is hit by a rocket and she dies. Babi was once a high school teacher, but was fired when the Soviets arrived. He taught Laila about the importance of being educated and believing that women would be the salvation of Afghanistan. He dies in the same rocket explosion as Laila’s mother.
- Mullah Faizullah: He is the tutor Mariam knew and loved. He came to the kolba to teach her the Koranic verses and prayers, but comes to admire her and believe she is a wonderful little girl who should be acknowledged by her father. He is devastated when her father marries her to Rasheed, but willingly saves the box that Jalil Khan leaves behind to save for the daughter he allowed to get away. He dies with the wish that his son guard the box for Mariam who will never see it.
- Abdul Sharif : He is a doorman at the Intercontinental hotel in Kabul who is paid by Rasheed to pretend he had been in the hospital room where Tariq was brought and died. His story to Laila is filled with tenderness, sorrow, and supposedly Tariq’s last words. However, even though Laila readily believes it, it is all a lie, and only when Mariam recognizes him when she goes to the hotel to call her father, does Laila learn that this is how Rasheed tricked her into marrying him.
- Notable structural, literary and stylistic techniques:
-There are several other literary devices that pop up at various times in the story. One of the most prevalent ones is foreshadowing which frequently presents clues of something that will happen later in the novel. Some examples of foreshadowing include:- Chapter 1.) When Jalil would leave, Nana would tell Mariam that he told rich lies - a rich man telling rich lies. She told Mariam that he had never taken her to see the tree and that he had betrayed them both by casting them out. This foreshadows how Jalil will one day refuse her entrance to his house and then marry her off to Rasheed............
- Chapter 18.) On a blistering hot day, Mariam puts on her burqa and she and Rasheed take a bus to the Intercontinental Hotel. Rasheed speaks to the doorman while Mariam stands to the side and watches. She thinks there is something vaguely familiar about the doorman. This foreshadows the fact that the doorman had told Laila his name was Abdul Sharif and he had witnessed Tariq’s death.
Symbols:-Chapter 1.) Nana tells Mariam that to Jalil and his wives, she was a mugwort or a weed that is ripped out and tossed aside. However, unlike a weed, she had to be replanted and given food and water on account of Mariam.
-Chapter 20.) Mariam is never very far away. She is mostly in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with a bursting radiance of a thousand suns. In this way, Mariam and Kabul have the same power for the people who love them.
Tone: At times, the tone is tragic, filled with despair, and very sad. At other times, it is uplifting and hopeful. And towards the end, it is a triumphant. Major conflicts (in abstract terms, with resolutions):
A major conflict in the novel is the discrimination of women.
Every group that rules Afghanistan allows men to have complete power over their wives and then, the Taliban makes it law. Beatings, murder, loss of control of their children, and humiliation are only a few of the discriminatory practices among some Muslim countries. They continue even today. Mariam and Laila were only two women in the story who were abused and mistreated by their husbands. It is only their sense of loyalty to their children that often gives them the strength to persevere. Finally, after the Taliban get forced out of Afghanistan, women’s rights start to take effect.
Key scenes (turning points, resolutions, climaxes--inc. page #'s):
-The climax of the novel is when Mariam murders Rasheed. After that, the lives of the two women take very different paths. Mariam is arrested for murdering Rasheed and is executed in the stadium in front of thousands of people. Laila escapes Kabul and goes to Pakistan with Tariq and her children. She eventually returns, first stopping in Herat to see the place where Mariam grew up, and then returning to Kabul to create a better home and a new school for her children and the children of orphanage. Key quotations (annotate: identify speaker, situation, and relevance--inc. page #'s):
- “She (Mariam) was being sent away because she was the walking, breathing embodiment of their shame.” (Pg. 48)
- “Where I come from, a woman’s face is her husband’s business only.” (Pg. 70)
- “But after four years of marriage, Mariam saw clearly how much a woman could tolerate when she was afraid.” (Pg. 98)
- “People…shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn’t fair.” (Pg. 119)
- “But Laila knew that her future was no match for her brothers’ past.” (Pg. 142)
- “What a man does in his home is his business.” (Pg. 266)
- “God made us differently, you women and us men. Our brains are different. You are not able to think like we can.” (Pg. 365)
- “Kabul is waiting. Needing. This journey home is the right thing to do.” (Pg. 392)
- “…Mariam is in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.” (Pg. 414) Your reactions/ reader responses (note personal reactions to any of the above categories, or any other element of the reading experience):
- I really enjoyed this book; it is definitely my favorite one I’ve read all year. I liked how it held my interest without something major happening every couple of pages.I also pleased by how Hosseini focused on the everyday life of his characters, it made it seem like this story actually happened. Notable literary devices present in work and how they contribute to meaning:- See “Notable structural, literary and stylistic techniques”.